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April 26th, 2012 by Gwynne Monahan

Not the Death of a Device, Just the Way It’s Used

While much of the media attention has focused on either the privacy policy and Terms of Service of Google Drive, or comparing it with Dropbox and Microsoft Skydrive, Sam Glover on Lawyerist wondered if Google Drive is the beginning of the end of the desktop.

That got us thinking. Last year we mused on whether or not the tablet spells the end of the desktop, and it occurred to use that the focus on been on the death of a device when it’s not the device that is dying, but the way in which it is being used.

Before the cloud caught on, most of the information we needed to access was stored locally on the desktop. Applications. Files. Photos. It rested somewhere on our hard drive. And there was only so much space on the hard drive. With the cloud, information has moved from the hard drive to servers run by someone else, and thus freed up hard drive space. Perhaps more importantly, the cloud freed us from sitting at a desk, typing up a document, blog post or responding to an email.

Be it from a laptop, tablet or smart phone, a fair amount of every day tasks can be completed without a desktop.

This point was made in a Google+ thread:

prashant tripathi
+Kimberly Peacock it’s not the end but this is going to happen damn soon. I use my desktop (or laptop for that matter) for two main reasons:
a) running an application to perform a job (word processing for instance).
b) storing my stuff (songs, movies for that sake). Now comes the cloud which is going to grant me both of these wishes.
So why on earth will I go back to good’ol laptop/desktop then? The only thing which I will need then will be an interface (like your cell phone or chrome book) to connect to the cloud.

Notice a device, be it a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone is still needed. So the devices themselves aren’t dying, just the way in which they are being used.

With Google Drive, as CIO posits, the “personal cloud” moves mainstream:

“Personal cloud is far more than just storage; it’s synchronization, it’s streaming, it’s sharing files. Those ultimately become more important to the consumer than things like the personal computer,” said Gartner Research Director Michael Gartenberg. “The age of the personal cloud becomes far more important than the personal computer.”

So will the service be more important than the device we use to access the service, or will the device start to play more of a role in the service we choose to use?